Virtuoso Action Director Lexi Alexander Fights Back Against Hollywood

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Lexi Alexander is easy enough to spot on a set: She’s the one in the middle of the huddle, surrounded on all sides by men—cameramen, stuntmen, sound guys, lighting guys, even a Guy Holding a Fake But Very Real-Looking Gun—and throwing punches around. Alexander is a film and television director, and on this sun-singed fall afternoon she’s taken over a corner in Toronto to work out the choreography for a street-scuffle scene on the NBC series Taken. Before she broke into Hollywood, Alexander was a martial arts champion; she not only knows how it looks when a fist connects with its target but how it feels. So with her crew looking on, Alexander pulls the fake-gun-toting colleague into the circle and carefully delivers a series of swift, demonstrative, thankfully fake jabs to the side of his head.

The rest of the day’s sparring, it turns out, is far more subliminal. Everyone is anxious to start filming as the daylight begins to fade and the streets fill up with rush-hour traffic. Alexander, though, doesn’t want to burn through the scene; she wants to make the moments leading up to the fight as tense as the fight itself. She suggests adding a gliding, unbroken steadicam shot to follow the hero down the street, and she requests that an additional camera be placed down low, inside a burned-out fake car, to capture the confrontation from an unexpected angle. Nothing revolutionary, but enough to ground the viewer in the action.

As Alexander explains her ideas, some of her collaborators nod eagerly while others respond with silent, stony expressions. Creative conflicts are all but required on any deadline-driven production, yet throughout the day it’s been impossible not to notice these low-frequency moments of resistance toward the director. You can see it when a colleague explains an obvious point to her, or when another tries to smoothly deflect one of her instructions.

Alexander has a tattoo on each arm—one reading “breathe,” the other reading “be still and know”—and she responds accordingly, only raising her voice briefly and to no one in particular. “I mean, shit—we actually have to give this [producer] his episode!” But she does take a moment to give me a look I’ve seen a few times today, her head tilted down and a subtle smirk flashing across her face, as if to say, “See what kind of nonsense I have to put up with?”

“I cannot explain why it is always so hostile, because when I do make an adjustment to a fight scene, I’ll go out of my way to do it in a nice way,” Alexander says a few months later, sounding at once bemused and exasperated. (She grew up in Germany; bemused exasperation is pretty much her default conversational mode.) We are sitting in a café in Hollywood, where we’re surrounded by MacBook-­enchanted screenwriter types. She’d begun the day with an hours-long workout focusing on Systema, a Russian martial art that involves sparring and occasional knife play and little of the BS she typically faces in her chosen line of work. “In martial arts, for every attack there is a counter you can throw,” she says. “Somebody traps you, you can throw a hook. But there is no counter for bias” in the entertainment business. “You cannot be super nice. You cannot be super badass. You cannot even be super good at your job. It simply doesn’t count in Hollywood.” On most sets, Alexander says, “there’s some people thinking, ‘Yeah, she’s coming up with something great.’ And there’s some people probably thinking I was just pretending, because how can a girl know better?”

Alexander may have been the first woman to direct a Marvel adaptation, but nine years later she’s still the only woman to direct a Marvel adaptation.

Alexander has been working in Hollywood for two decades, during which time the 42-year-old half-German, half-Palestinian filmmaker earned an Oscar nomination for her first short film and watched as her outlandishly violent 2008 adaptation of Marvel Comics’ Punisher franchise, Punisher: War Zone, became an unlikely cult favorite. But she also had to endure that film’s original box office failure, its savage critical reception, and a seven-year stretch in which she couldn’t land a single movie-directing gig.

After the success of Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman earlier this summer, it wasn’t unusual to see articles predicting, or even proclaiming, that the film’s massive box office would force studio executives to deviate from their go-for-bro business strategy and give more female directors a crack at mega-budgeted summer movies (or any movies, really). But a closer examination of Alexander’s experiences—as well as her career-resuscitating Twitter feed—shows that change in Hollywood doesn’t happen overnight. She may have been the first woman to direct a Marvel adaptation, but nine years later she’s still the only woman to direct a Marvel adaptation.

“Someone once said to me, ‘What’s great about you is you’re a woman and you can do action,’ ” Alexander says. “And part of me is thinking, ‘Fuck, yeah! Keep thinking that!’ Meanwhile, the other part is thinking, ‘Fuck this sexist shit.’”

Whenever fans discussPunisher: War Zone, the conversation usually finds its way to the film’s most infamous scene: a nighttime rooftop sequence across a neon-lit cityscape in which a trio of parkour-trained baddies leap from building to building in dramatic slow motion ... until one of them is unexpectedly annihilated by a giant rocket, sending limbs into the streets below. The moment is startling and giddily from outta nowhere—which makes total sense once you ride shotgun next to Alexander.

“Hold on.”

Alexander says this with deceptive calm as we tear down a four-lane street in her silver Prius, careening past a series of low-level, fenced-off industrial spaces in northeastern Los Angeles, a gentle Egyptian folk-rock song playing on the stereo. She’s running late for a meeting with Black Mask Studios, a young but heavily cool-accredited comic-book company. Just as the car’s speedometer is climbing from slightly over the limit to oh hey, wait, what?, Alexander realizes she has zoomed past her destination and rapidly spirals the steering wheel, whipping us across all four lanes and into the other direction with nary a screech.

Alexander has been driving around LA like this since the late ’90s, when she moved here to try and make it as a stuntperson. Growing up in Mannheim, Germany, she’d been all but forced to study martial arts by her mother, who witnessed her combative streak early on. “It was literally like fire would come out of me,” Alexander says. “But a doctor said, ‘Put her in a sport where all this energy could go.’” She started with judo, then switched to karate and kickboxing before enrolling in tournaments and eventually winning a World Karate Association championship in the mid-’90s.

Thanks to a green card she says was sponsored in part by Chuck Norris, whom she’d met on the fighting circuit, she came to America and started doing stuntwork. She’d get dropped out of multistory buildings and tossed out of moving vehicles, often with little in the way of protection. “They put actresses in either no clothes or really tight clothes, so we can never wear any padding,” she says, laughing. “It’s like, ‘Can you fall down three flights of stairs in lingerie?’ ”

"Discrimination is so hard to prove," Alexander says. "It’s not like I had a million credits and the guy who gets the job had zero credits."

Alexander also took Method acting classes, only to realize that onscreen performing—with its endless offscreen downtime—was too slow for her. But directing? That brought the fire out. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s what I’m supposed to do.’” She read books on low-budget moviemaking, attended an extension class at UCLA, and started analyzing what kinds of short films won Academy Awards, with the ultimate goal of getting nominated in that category herself. By the early ’00s, she was ready to direct. “It was a formulaic plan,” she says. “I knew the nomination process. And I knew that a previous winner was about 38 minutes long and shot somewhere in the South.”

To make her first movie, she taught martial arts seminars for a year and saved up $35,000 so she could finance and direct Johnny Flynton, the story of a slow-witted, kind-hearted boxer. Like much of Alexander’s future work, Flynton was a tough, character­-focused movie with bursts of violence, and it featured the sort of devastating body blows Alexander had observed (and experienced) during her years of training. The film came out in 2002, and it was 38 minutes long and set in the rural South.

Soon enough, Alexander had her Oscar nomination (she lost) and a chance at her first feature: 2005’s indie Green Street Hooligans, a drama about “hooligan firms”—a term for scarily loyal soccer fans—that culminates in a face-smashing, head-kicking brawl that displays Alexander’s talent for precise, spacious action sequences. The movie made less than half a million at the US box office, but it won the audience and jury prizes for narrative features at South by Southwest and did well enough overseas to put her in contention to direct a few big Hollywood movies. (She says she was up for Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie, and Whiteout, with Kate Beckinsale, though the respective producers wouldn’t confirm if they considered her for the jobs.) “There’s a million of these interviews,” she says of the hiring process. “You go in there, you read the script, you talk to the writers. And the shortlist was always me against two or three guys.” In the end, she’d never get the gig. “And this is why discrimination is so hard to prove: It’s not like I had a million credits and the guy who gets the job had zero credits. But I was considered to be the hot director, and they’ll give it to somebody who may have had one more movie than me.”

Two years passed and Alexander was running out of money. When her agents passed along the script for Punisher: War Zone to her, she barely knew anything about the titular Marvel antihero, a dour, tight-lipped vigilante with an extensive personal arsenal. She turned it down. “When I was nominated for an Oscar and seated next to Martin Scorsese, there was nothing in my mind that made me think, ‘Hey, in three years maybe I’ll make another remake of Punisher,’” she says. (Two earlier Punisher films came out in 1989 and 2004.) As she read the comics, though, she warmed to the idea of an action-­fueled Punisher that also happened to be a black comedy. “Lexi saw the Punisher as this very funny, but very dark, reflection of somebody who puts on a costume and quote-unquote ‘takes the law into their own hands,’” says Patton Oswalt, a fan of War Zone and a friend of Alexander’s. “If somebody were seriously damaged and didn’t have [a] moral code, where would that go?’

She signed on to direct the $35 million project, and she focused on creating her version of an action movie—which, not surprisingly, wasn’t in line with the more mainstream approaches of the time. Throughout the last two decades, even the most modest action films have strived for videogame-like velocity, employing a rapid-cut cinematic style that’s intended to convey frantic freneticism. (Think of the blinding-fast punch-ups of the Bourne films or the ridiculously over-chopped Taken series, which seemingly required at least a dozen vertigo-inducing cuts just to depict Liam Neeson scaling a fence.) Most of the time, this high-speed approach leaves viewers exhilarated, if baffled. It’s hard to care too much about some lummox getting shivved in the eye if you can’t even see his face to begin with.

Alexander, in her martial arts and her filmmaking, believes that one well-timed punch can be more devastating than 10 random ones. When shooting War Zone’s fight scenes, she would sometimes take static shots to maximize the impact of each carefully choreographed punch or kick or parkour-interrupting rocket­-blast. This appreciation for the singular, decisive action stems from her tournament years, when she and her teammates spent hours watching each other spar on the mats, where an entire match could come down to a single blow. “There was this huge reaction when somebody made an amazing hit,” she says. “And when I started choreographing action scenes, I thought, ‘Shouldn’t I give the audience that same feeling I had when I was watching fights, where I’d scream because of one hit?’ ”

War Zone, which came out at the end of 2008, wound up being an untamed, Grand Guignol–style caravan of carnage—certainly the gnarliest adaptation of a Marvel comic. It’s a lovingly filmed, precisely choreographed, beautifully unsavory bit of B-movie excess. (Imagine Die Hard if it had been dreamed up by a bunch of Garbage Pail Kids.) “One of the best-made bad movies I’ve seen,” Roger Ebert wrote in a clearly conflicted two-star review that conceded that the film’s “only flaw is that it’s disgusting.” Oswalt, an early supporter, wrote an exuberant MySpace post about the movie, noting that War Zone “made [him] cackle like a railyard hobo who's found half a cigar and a can of beans,” and praising its “mayhem, insanity, and just-plain bugfuckedness.”

It’s hard to discount Alexander’s claims that her extended stay in “director’s jail” may have something to do with her being a woman.

Other viewers were far harsher—A. O. Scott’s review in The New York Times noted Alexander’s “grisly intensity” as a director and ended with the word “misery.” Similar bad reviews, combined with the film’s R rating and right-before-Christmas opening date, led to a disastrous opening weekend. (The film wound up grossing less than $8 million in total, about $310 million less than one of the year’s other Marvel adaptations, Iron Man.) On the Monday morning after War Zone’s release, Alexander says, she was fired by her agents. Devastated, she didn’t leave her bed for a week. “I knew what it would ultimately mean for me,” she says.

The years following War Zone marked the lowest stage of Alexander’s career, and even as that movie developed an online cult following and became subjected to how-did-we-all-miss-this? essays and reexaminations, “the buzz didn’t mean anything for me,” Alexander says. For nearly a decade, she hasn’t been able to get anything made, except for a small, direct-to-DVD drama called Lifted in 2010, and it’s impossible to know what caused the drought to last for so long. Studio executives don’t like to talk about why someone doesn’t get hired, at least not on the record, so they may have simply preferred to hire directors whose last film wasn’t a notorious bomb. Or they may have thought War Zone was total schlock and its director schlocky by association. But it’s hard to discount Alexander’s claims that her extended stay in “director’s jail” may have something to do with her being a woman, especially when you consider the similar cases of directors Mimi Leder and Karyn Kusama (both of whom have said they attribute their previous, post-bomb career freeze-outs to their gender); or the study by the Annenberg Foundation that found that, of the 100 top movies of 2016, a mere 4 percent were directed by women; or the multitudes of patronizing, patriarchal tales on the Shit People Say to Women Directors tumblr. As it turns out, Alexander had a few tales of her own to share.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when Lexi Alexander, struggling filmmaker, became @Lexialex, accidental empowerment enabler, but it likely began in early 2014. At the time, Alexander was being approached by journalists about Hollywood’s lack of female directors, and she responded with a pointed essay for her personal blog. “There is no lack of female directors,” she wrote. “But there is a huge lack of people willing to give female directors opportunities. I swear, if anyone near me even so much as whispers the sentence ‘Women probably don’t want to direct,’ my fist will fly as a reflex action.” She added: “By letter of the law, all female directors must fall in one of two categories: Difficult or Indecisive. Bitch or Ditz. Hello, my name is Lexi Alexander, Difficult Bitch. Nice to meet you!”

Conversations about unfair hiring practices began radiating across Alexander’s Twitter feed, and she started tweeting stories about the maddening hurdles of being a female filmmaker—like the driver who declined to take her to the set of her own movie because he was “waiting for the director”—while also calling out the whitewashed casting of movies like Gods of Egypt and Ghost in the Shell. Hers are the sort of direct, casually unruly observations that you rarely hear aired publicly in the entertainment world.

“In Hollywood, like in comics, you get the idea that there are certain things you shouldn’t talk about in a certain way if you want to get more gigs,” says G. Willow Wilson, the Eisner-­nominated writer of Marvel’s hit Ms. Marvel. “But Lexi’s willing to go to the mat for what she believes in rather than staying quiet in hopes of currying favor.”

“Until I was on Twitter, trust me: I was completely wiped off everybody’s consciousness in Hollywood,” Alexander says.

It turns out Alexander’s online combativeness would only help her career. “Until I was on Twitter, trust me: I was completely wiped off everybody’s consciousness in Hollywood,” she says. But after Twitter, she says, “somebody would be looking for a female director for something, and an assistant would bring up my name because she follows me.” That enhanced recognizability, combined with the continued online affection for War Zone, was a reminder to producers that Lexi Alexander was still very much around. Andrew Kreisberg, who executive produces Arrow and Supergirl, hired Alexander to direct episodes of both CW shows, in part because “War Zone wasn’t one of these $150 million movies” that had a lot of money to stage expensive action sequences, he says. “It had a level of ingenuity that we require on our shows.” And when the producers of Crossface, a biopic of doomed WWE wrestler Chris Benoit, started looking for a director last year, they saw in Alexander (IRL and on Twitter) a person who understands the interior lives of fighters. “She not only knows how to hit and punch,” says Crossface coproducer (and War Zone fan) Alex Ginzburg, “but how to get punched as well.” It will be Alexander’s first feature film in seven years.

Alexander on the set of her first studio film, 2008’s Punisher: War Zone.

Peter Yang

Back on the Toronto set, Alexander pops a trio of Advils and gets ready for the gangsters-with-guns showdown.

“The fight’s over before it begins,” she explains to the crew. “Kind of like the way I fight.”

“I don’t think so,” one of them chuckles under his breath, out of earshot. Maybe it was a jibe; maybe it was a failed attempt at levity. Either way, it’s hard to imagine anyone saying that within 100 feet of Michael Bay.

From Wonder Woman and Kathryn Bigelow’s new thriller Detroit to the successes of director Stella Meghie’s Everything, Everything and Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, you can almost hear Hollywood’s male studio execs congratulating themselves on making 2017 the Year We Finally Hired More Women. And even though two women recently signed on to direct Marvel adaptations in the coming years (Anna Boden’s Captain Marvel and Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Silver and Black), and even though the past year has been the most active of her career, Alexander knows this moment could be just as ephemeral as a late-night Twitter salvo. Because it’s still not unusual for her to get a directing job and have to cross out every “he” or “his” in the contract; or to sit in a meeting and not know if she’s there because of her talent or because someone needs to tick off a box.

During the final moments of daylight in Toronto, Alexander takes a seat behind a monitor and watches as, after just a few takes, she gets the scene she wants. Several crew members congratulate her, including a few who balked at her earlier attempts to change the scene. “See what happens,” she tells one of them affectionately, “when you break the rules?” He smiles and nods, and Alexander gets ready to take her next shot.

Brian Raftery (@brianraftery) wrote about the 10th anniversary of Funny or Die in issue 25.04.